If anyone is listening, I’m not liking the new blog format. I just clicked on this article expecting to “read more” and there was nothing in addition to read. Now I need to click back to glance at all the other one sentence posts? Disappointed with this interface/design. I was hoping that Make would go the route of boingboing and add the ability to just continue to scroll to read new stories instead of clicking “next page” – this seems to be going backwards in ease of use. Just my two cents – sorry if it sounds trollish.

Sean Ragan

We are listening, thanks, and the problem you describe is on our radar. Thanks for your feedback and your patience!

I too really dislike the new format – and the one before when you reduced the number of articles per page was pretty pants as well – It looks to me as though each re-design is a cheep trick to encourage more clicks to impress advertisers/bosses with a number of clicks/interactions ‘sigh’ – still the best site on the net. Sorry to hijack your post John Baichtal fantastic concept that I’ll be trying to implement.

Sean Ragan

That’s about half the truth, really. Our traffic numbers have gone up with the changes, yes, but we know it doesn’t represent a real increase in readership. The value to us is chiefly that those numbers give us a much more accurate picture of the true size of our audience, now. It’s a touch choice: The design annoys some readers and probably costs us a few, but now we have better data. When we switched to WordPress, we took a large traffic hit, which surprised us a lot, and which we don’t really believe represented a real change in readership. We realized then that the numbers we were depending on to make programming decisions were really quite inaccurate, and we started thinking about design changes that would improve them. The new format is still formally an “experiment,” so it might change again, but I’ll be surprised if it ever completely returns to the old design. Thanks for bearing with us.

g2-b5f04b3c4fa1171f66c0bc02b4cbd505

Hi Sean, I’ve a background in elearning and web design and the golden rule has always been -the more clicks you put in the way of the user and the information they want the worse the it is – Shame you have to compromise useability for “program decision making”….. us humans are a lazy bunch and the fact we have to navigate to a separate page and back again just to view an article may discourage us from ever viewing it ;-S

g2-b5f04b3c4fa1171f66c0bc02b4cbd505

couldn’t resist seeing how thin this column would go :-) :-)

http://lrwickerdesign.net/ lrwickerdesign

Excellent build. I use my backyard for much of my photography, but waiting for good light conditions makes for many headaches. I have been thinking of something like this for a while. Now I don’t even have to rack my brain for a design, thanks!

Philip Barton

Me Too! You should get the clever guys at “MAKE” to look at it and make it simpler!!